This file photo, provided by SK Telecom Co. on Nov. 25, 2020, shows its artificial intelligence semiconductor, the SAPEON X220.
SEOUL, Feb. 15 (Korea Bizwire) — The government is accelerating efforts to cultivate the artificial intelligence (AI) chip area amid stiffer global competition in generative AI resulting from ChatGPT fever.
It’s estimated that the operating costs of ChatGPT, which uses about 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), are astronomical. Against this backdrop, AI chip development is drawing ever-increasing attention.
The government and domestic firms are paying keen attention to processing-in-memory (PIM) technology that uses non-volatile memory chips to carry out high-speed cumulative arithmetic operations as well as to greatly reduce power consumption.
The nation’s major IT and semiconductor companies have teamed up to join the AI chip development race. The most attention-grabbing move is the collaboration between Samsung Electronics Co. and Naver Corp.
Market analysts expect that the cross-industry collaboration to develop cheaper and more efficient AI chips will gain further momentum.
The Ministry of Science and ICT earmarked 42.8 billion won (US$33.5 million) for this year and 100 billion won until 2025 to supply domestically-made AI chips to data centers on a gradual basis, aimed at demonstrating domestic cloud-based AI services.
The government will issue notices on seven K-cloud projects using domestically-made AI chips and select the operator for the establishment of a neural processing unit (NPU) farm by next month.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
